Over the past decade, enterprises have experienced a substantial increase in the productivity of its workforce when providing them with business mobile devices. In the past, given their high cost, business mobile devices were mainly allocated to management and focused on providing employees with email access and cellular phone capabilities. However, recent improvements in the computing power, mobile display technologies and connection speeds of mobile devices, combined with the continued decreases in hardware costs, have made powerful mobile devices available even to the general public for personal use. More and more individuals personally own powerful mobile devices, such as smartphones, that, in addition to serving as a cellular phone, can be used in many of the same ways as a desktop or a laptop, such as accessing emails, browsing documents or the internet, game playing, listening to audio or viewing a video, and personal information management (PIM).
Due to the above trends in mobile devices, enterprises are currently experiencing an “invasion” of personal devices into the workplace. Given the sophisticated capabilities of their personal mobile devices, employees no longer desire possessing a separate personal and business mobile device and continually pressure information technology (IT) departments to support personal devices brought into the workplace. As such, IT departments struggle to maintain a proper balance between enabling a certain level of access to enterprise data (e.g., such as access to email, contacts, documents, and the like) on personal devices and ensuring adequate security measures to protect corporate intellectual property in such enterprise data. This phenomenon has led enterprises to investigate the viability of a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) strategy to IT, where a personal mobile device is provisioned by IT departments with the capability of operating as a complete business mobile device in a secure fashion.
Such a BYOD strategy could significantly decrease IT costs (e.g., by eliminating or reducing the need to purchase and provision hardware devices) and provide mobile enterprise access to many more employees than was previously possible (e.g., due to cost concerns), thereby achieving greater increases in productivity than before. However, significant challenges arise in providing streamlined user interfaces on the mobile device that enable users to seamlessly switch from a personal mobile environment to a business mobile environment while still maintaining adequate security and data partitioning between the “personal world” and “business world” on the mobile device.